Press Release
REMIX
The old masters of earlier centuries have inspired me to paint the series of these works: van Eyck and Da Vinci from the fifteenth century, Vermeer of the sixteenth century, Degas, Munch, Gallén-Kallela and Simberg from the nineteenth and of the turn of the twentieth century, as well as Kahlo and Picasso of the modern times.
These masters have no special link to me, but they all have something that made me remix their masterworks. In the beginning I merely started to modernize the works. I chose the two, to my mind the absolute Finnish masterpieces, the Mother of Lemminkäinen and the Wounded Angel and by painting the figures to wear modern outfits, brought them to our times.
Eventually my point of view shifted towards an ironic direction: in the process I started to discover lightness simultaneously with modernism. The ermine of Da Vinci do not agree in posing any more, instead it peevishly bites the lady´s finger, and the lord of the Arnolfini family could be renamed the lord of the Jackson family, etc. There is no deep meaning to find in these paintings, merely the desire to set free the serious, static figures from their honourable status of posing towards a lighter atmosphere. I simply had fun with them… more with some than the others.
The works are oil paintings on canvas.
Heidi Hirvonen
Roma
